ABSTRACT
Source: Spring J. Cry Hard and Swim. The story of an incest survivor. London: Virago Press, 1987. Reproduced by permission.
I drove home after my first incest survivors’ group meeting, and sat for a long time in my car outside the house, trying to take in the vision I had seen for the first time that night, of the harm that incest does, the lives ruined, relationships unhappy, or broken, or impossible to undertake, survivors’ children scarred, the loneliness, grief, guilt, the physical and psychological punishment meted out to victims for the rest of their lives. That I had suffered thus I knew, and had mostly come to terms with. That this same suffering had a thousand faces, a thousand variations, and yet that these variations were on the same themes, the same issues as my own, made me know that I was only beginning to see, that I had just caught my first glimpse of a boundless ocean of pain.
